Motorcycle airbag from Honda

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Motorcycle airbag from Honda
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Motorcycle airbag from Honda

Motorcycle airbag from Honda
Air principle

If an obstacle suddenly puts a brake on motorcycling, the Honda Gold Wing will in future throw an airbag with 150 liters of air into the breach. Progress or air number?

Werner Enzmann

10/12/2005

Because passive safety is much more difficult to implement on a motorcycle than on a car, the driver’s equipment in particular has had to have a protective effect up to now. Airbag jackets, such as those first developed by Aprilia in 1998 and later by Dainese, were also intended to protect the driver immediately in the event of an accident and even if he had detached himself from the machine. The type and speed of triggering – by cable pull and with a CO cartridge – were the key to success-
these constructions
but in the way.
Now Honda is bringing in for them Gold wing a built-in airbag like in a car. With an upright seating position, plenty of space in front of the driver and a massive cladding including leg protection as an abutment for the driver and airbag, the concept of the Honda Tourer is ideal for this. The question is: what benefits can be expected from the airbag on a two-wheeler??
The answer depends on the assumed accident scenario. “The main thing is to get away from the motorcycle” – this motto still applies to a fall on the open road. However, this is rather the exception, like the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of two-wheeler accidents, the MAIDS project supported by the EU Commission,
has shown. Almost 1,000 two-wheeler accidents in Germany and four other EU countries were reconstructed and evaluated in detail by specialist teams. The results include that 55 percent of serious motorcycle accidents are frontal collisions. The motorcycle hits an obstacle in the direction of travel – most often a car. In more than 70 percent of the cases, the “impact speed” is less than 50 km / h. A third of all injuries are caused by contact with a car. It is known from crash tests that the greatest risk for motorcyclists is when the head hits the hard roof edge of the car.
For a long time, accident researchers therefore saw flying over an obstacle in the event of a collision as a target and the airbag as a possible help. But when Honda started working on the airbag project around 1990, the idea that the airbag should catapult motorcyclists over the car as far as possible was soon dropped. The reasons: Vans, pick-ups and off-road vehicles are getting higher and higher. You can’t fly over trucks, buses and vans anyway. And besides: what comes after the flight?
So the airbag has to reduce the kinetic energy of the break pilot as much as possible before it comes into contact with any obstacle. So that the driver is involved in a frontal collision
50 km / h did not touch the opposing vehicle, a fairly large airbag was necessary: ​​150 liters are the series-ready version that will be available for the Gold Wing from 2006. The next candidate in the Honda range could be the touring scooter Silver Wing 600 – it offers in terms of seating position
and installation options similar to those of the Gold Wing and was shown with an airbag prototype at the last Intermot last autumn; the airbag does not currently fit on sports bikes. The suggested V-shape of the airbag, which is attached to the frame with two strong straps, is intended to keep the rider on the motorcycle even in the event of a slight side impact.
In order to be able to trigger the airbag as early as possible, two sensors were placed on each fork leg. There they record the horizontal acceleration very precisely and reliably. Accidental triggers must not happen, they would inevitably lead to a fall. Therefore, not only are the measured values ​​of the sensors constantly compared, the rotational acceleration of the fork around the steering axis is also calculated. The airbag only inflates when all four sensors deliver a signal that exceeds a specified limit value. “We can guarantee that there will be no false triggering,” says Honda. At BMW, the Honda advance is being watched carefully. The Munich-based company has also developed a motorcycle airbag, and production readiness is within reach. But the project is currently not being pushed, the benefits are believed to be too limited. “Customers,” said press spokesman Jurgen Stoffregen, “could expect more from an airbag from a manufacturer such as BMW than it redeems.”

Airbag on the Honda Gold Wing: technology

The electronics detected a collision just 0.015 seconds after the first contact with the car and released the propellant charge
of the airbag (Fig. 2). After 0.06 seconds, the airbag has fully deployed (Fig. 3) and begins to absorb the driver’s kinetic energy. At the 50 km / h impact shown here, the dummy comes to a standstill after a total of 0.15 seconds without touching the car

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